Consuming the Twitter Streaming API with Ruby and MongoDB

Jeff LinwoodLone Star Ruby Conference V

August 12, 2011http://www.jefflinwood.com

@jefflinwood

Friday, August 12, 2011

Goals

• Watch for any tweet that contains certain keywords

• Store those tweets into the MongoDB database

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Demo (@aplusk)

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Twitter Streaming API+ Mongo DB

• Twitter Streaming API

• MongoDB

• Not a web application

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The many APIs of Twitter

• Twitter Streaming API

• User Streams

• Site Streams (for the big boys)

• REST API

• Search API

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Twitter Streaming API

• Keywords

• Users

• Locations

Great photo is by rachel_thecathttp://www.flickr.com/photos/23209605@N00/2786126623/

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TweetStream gem by Michael Bleighhttps://github.com/intridea/tweetstream

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Connecting to the Twitter Streaming API• JSON responses

• HTTP Basic Authentication

• One stream per account (dev/prod)

• Leave it open!

• Don’t constantly reconnect, and if you do, back off

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Limitations of Twitter Streaming API

• 400 Keywords

• 5,000 User Ids

• 25 Location Boxes

• Can ask Twitter for increased access

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A Tweet, in JSON

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Intro to MongoDB

• NoSQL - what does that mean?

• Great fit for JSON-oriented applications

• If you don’t know your schema in advance

• Query language

• Map Reduce

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Storing data in MongoDB

• Native format of MongoDB is BSON, similar to JSON

• Connect to a database (similar to MySQL)

• Connect to a collection (created if it doesn’t exist)

• Insert JSON (in our case, a tweet)

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MongoDB + Ruby

• mongo gem

• bson_ext gem

• http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ruby+Language+Center

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Considerations for MongoDB

• Tweets - very verbose JSON

• Date format in Tweets not same as MongoDB

• May want to pre-process Tweets

• Can use both MongoDB and MySQL in same app if you want

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Here’s the code

• Okay, the whole thing is really done in about three lines.

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Where do you run this?

• Command line

• Your own server

• Heroku + MongoLab

• Other cloud services

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MongoLab

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Now what?

• Step 1: Collect Tweets

• Step 2: ????

• Step 3: Profit!

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To Learn More

• https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/concepts

• http://www.mongodb.org/

• https://github.com/jefflinwood/Tweeter-Keeper

• http://www.jefflinwood.com/

• @jefflinwood on Twitter

Friday, August 12, 2011